Now, Discover Your Strengths (Book Review)

Now, Discover Your Strengths, by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton can assist in better managing employees. More importantly, however, it can assist each of us in increasing our professional and personal success.

In First, Break All the Rules, Buckingham discussed the importance of helping employees discover their talents, the things at which they are naturally good, and building on those rather than trying to correct weaknesses. It is a matter of trying pull out what is already inside the person, not trying to put in what was left out.

In Now, Discover Your Strengths, Buckingham and Clifton discuss in great detail how, from infancy, our talents are created and how we can identify and build them into strengths rather than trying to fix our weaknesses. The basis of the book in the Internet-based Strengths-Finder Profile. This is the product of a 25-year effort by The Gallop Organization to identify the most prevalent human strengths.

Talents, combined with knowledge and skills, create strengths, those things that we can do near perfectly, consistently. Talents are innate, and the knowledge and skill are learned. With this knowledge about ourselves, it is possible to be more successful.

The book discusses how to build strengths. It also discusses how to manage around weaknesses, which is more effective than trying to fix them.